Netaji comes ‘alive’ again, Cong calls it Nehru bashing

Netaji comes ‘alive’ again, Cong calls it Nehru bashing

Anil SharmaUpdated: Saturday, June 01, 2019, 02:38 AM IST
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New Delhi :  The reported “official’ leak of Intelligence Bureau files has brought the heroic Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose ‘alive’ again in the public domain. The ‘selective leaks’ publish-ed by a news magazine reveal that the IB kept alive a surveillance regime on Netaji’s family for 20 years (1948-1968) and attribute this to a ‘ paranoia’ on the part of the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

“The government was not sure whether Bose was dead, and thought that if he were alive he would be in some form of communication with his family in Calcutta,” said BJP spokesman M J Akbar, virtually endorsing this argument and adding a stamp of authenticity to the Congress description of this as an exercise in Nehru bashing.

“The anti-Nehruvian obsession makes the BJP blind to some obvious realities. When they make this allegation they forget that it automatically targets other iconic leaders who were Prime Ministers — Lal Bahadur Shastri, Gulzarilal Nanda and Indira Gandhi. Also the IB cannot carry out any surveillance without the home minister’s express approval; so the BJP is also targeting Sardar

Vallabhbhai Patel, C Rajagopalachari, Kailash Nath Katju, Govind Vallabh Pant, Nanda and Yasheantrao Chavan,” charged party spokes-person Abhishek Manu Singhvi.

In a stinging attack on the BJP-RSS shoot and scoot mentality, Singhvi said: “We apologize for using such expressions but the underlying presumption seems to be that all these national icons were mortally afraid that Netaji would come back and grab their chairs.”

He stressed that there have been three enquiry commissions into the controversy surrounding Netaji’s death. ‘‘We are not going into the merits or demerits of these enquiries. But there is no doubt about his death,” he added, thus refuting the paranoia theory. The Congress also added that the insinuation against Nehru is also not rooted in facts since he died in1964. “How could he influence this after his death,” commented Singhvi.

Getting into the details of the matter, Singhvi maintained that through successive governments there has been a consensus that these files would not be released in the interest of national security. “As late as December 2014 prime minister Narendra Modi told Parliament that these files would not be released, although during the election campaign the then BJP president Rajnath Singh had emphatically declared that all information related to Netaji would be released,” said Singhvi.

He further said that the BJP government owes an explanation about these selective leaks. ‘‘We are not asking that all classified informa-tion should be brought into the public domain, but then if the government wants to do so, then instead of using these selective leaks, the government should table all the 89 files related to Netaji in the public domain so that instead of such insinuations, the people get to know the entire context as well as the details of the correspondence,” he added.

Even as the Congress was on offensive against the BJP government for these ‘leaks’ there is a wide body of opinion within the party that is uncomfortable with the idea that such surveillance was going on even after the country became independent. ‘‘It was quite natural for the IB to do so under the British Raj, but the fact that such a practice was continued after the end of the imperial regime is more a comment on the mindset of the babus, and successive administrations,” said a senior Congress leader.

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